I tried to set up a new site on my VPS. Suddenly, I couldn't call up any of my other websites anymore. I double checked the status of apache2 and mysql with systemctl. I double checked ufw status. I don't even remember all the things I double checked. Until it finally hit me... connected my VPN service (Private Internet Access), tried again, and, voilà, everything works. Managed to get my own IP address banned through fail2ban somehow during the setup of that new site.

Dear unicode consortium: Can we please get a smash-head-on-keyboard emoji?

do you actually have problems with tons of attempted brute-force logins? what i do on my VPS is disable password auth. for SSH, only via RSA key. there's still people trying to log in with passwords, but no matter how long they do that, they'll never have a chance. and it's never come to the point that it amounted to a DOS attack, disturbing the server.

I have no reference for "tons of", but I do get an awful lot of notifications from fail2ban. Yes, I also disabled password authentication for SSH, but I also set up a jail for apache-auth (which is what locked me out), and in any case I figured, there is no such thing as "too many security measures" when it comes to a server that's exposed to the web.

I just wrote another article that I figured I'd share. I thought about this after I wrote the last one. For most of us, this concept is kind of obvious, but I know a lot of people for whom it wouldn't be. If I sent them a link to my article and told them, oh, and by the way, here's my diaspora* ID, so you can add me after you sign up, some of them might have problems and get frustrated.

After I wrote my overview of decentralized social networking yesterday, I realized that there is one vital thing that needs to be added. If one of your friends invited you to try decentralized social networking, and your only experience is with the commercial ones where you can just “search” for the people you know by their names or e-mail addr...

Address Verification allows you to be sure you are securely communicating with the right person, while PGP support adds encrypted email interoperability. Starting with the latest release of ProtonMail on web (v3.14), iOS and Android (v1.9), and the latest versions of the ProtonMail IMAP/SMTP Bridge, ProtonMail now supports Address Verification, along with full PGP interoperability …

@Mark Nowiasz No, not yet, I only came across it recently. But thanks, I'll check it out! For me, the most important part in this post is that they now support exchanging regular PGP e-mails with non-Protonmail users.

I still like having an e-mail address that's not associated with any of my domains; first off, I need to provide an outside address to my web host, and second of all, there are people I don't need to point my domains out to, even if it has my actual name on it. For some people, none of their business

Regarding keybase.io: It solves the problem of key trust. The conventional approach is web of trust - i.e. you trust someone to verify someone else's identify and so on. Unfortunately it's very highly unlikely that there are enough connections to make this work - especially if the other guy you want to communicate securely with is on another continent. Conventonal key signing also emphasizes on identity verification - identiy cards, passports, etc making pseudonymous secure and trusted usage next to impossible.

Keybase.io takes a completely different approach: You prove to keybase.io (in fact, everyone is encouraged to check to proofs themselves via keybase client) that domain(s), websites, github accounts, whatever are under your control - which is far more helpful than having someone had a look at your identity card: To encrypt a message to someone you only knew by his/her Twitter handle (github account, whatever) you only need to check his Twitter proof No need to know what his name would be in real life. It's quite an excellent idea. For example, I've proven that I control a couple of domains/websites, so it's extremely likely that the key belongs really to me (instead of an imposter).

I wrote another blog post about decentralized social media; I tried twice before (a while back), but they didn't really come out as I'd hoped.

My goal with this one is to explain the concept to people who never heard of it and are also not the most tech-oriented. I don't want to go into too much technical detail, just make people aware that such a thing exists. I'm sharing it here for anybody who feels like reading it and giving feedback. Just remember, though, that you are not the intended audience .

But if there's anything in there that's blatantly wrong, please let me know.

My reason for writing this is that I know from a friend who still is on Facebook that he has a few contacts who apparently have had enough - the smart ones, I guess. He himself is also thinking about dumping it, but I can work with him directly. This is something I want him to send to those of his friends who he wants to stay in touch with.

(For the impatient, there’s a link list at the bottom 😉 ) I already wrote two blog posts about federated social media after I first got onto diaspora* and then Friendica. Somehow they both got somewhat out of hand and went into way too much detail. You can read them here and here. Since I know of some people now who really want to get off the ...

Thanks for writing this up. I’ll share it on FB (when I do a drive-by at some point). A couple of other things worth mentioning:

One of the things that attracts people to Friendica and Hubzilla is forums (akin to private groups in Facebook). Worth mentioning because it is a popular feature on FB.

Also, Friendica and Hubzilla interconnect with all of the other decentralized platforms, which is a feature that is incomparable to anything in the closed networks. Imagine if your FB timeline could also pull in posts from people you would like to follow on Twitter and Instagram. A one-stop shop.

Thanks for the forum hint, I didn't realize that people care about this kind of functionality that much. I haven't been on Facebook forever. It's also not something I'm using here that much (yet).

Thanks for sharing it, too.

Edit: I had to delete the original comment and write a new one, since I noticed that the mention of your Friendica account still shows your e-mail address, even though I can now see your name in my connections and on comments. Mentioning the Hubzilla account instead.

That’s thoughtful of you, Tanja. I did change it immediately when you informed me before. And it does show up with the change for D* users. But I’ve noticed that profile changes on other platforms can take a while to propagate to Hubzilla. (Sometimes, they never propagate.)

I use both accounts for reading, liking, and commenting. But Hubzilla is still my home.

That’s thoughtful of you, Tanja. I did change it immediately when you informed me before. And it does show up with the change for D* users. But I’ve noticed that profile changes on other platforms can take a while to propagate to Hubzilla. (Sometimes, they never propagate.)

I use both accounts for reading, liking, and commenting. But Hubzilla is still my home.

While some of you might already be on their way into the weekend, those of us who work in retail are often not so lucky. This is my working weekend, which I have every other weekend, trading off with the one other regular employee. So, working this afternoon and tomorrow morning. Everybody else, have a nice weekend.

I think I'm gonna start posting more pictures. I also need to start taking more pictures again, I haven't worked as a photographer in a while, and somehow I got out of doing it as a hobby, too. So here's an old one.

Looks very nice, and I'm looking forward to more of those ... but unfortunately when I try to open the picture in its original size the system is telling me "this image failed to load". I suppose a Hubzilla setting behind that and would like to find out which. May you have loaded the picture file into a directory with restricted access?

strange, it fails to load for me too. it's not permissions though since when i copy the image URL -- not from the image as it appears in my own stream but when i'm on your (tanja's) profile -- that opens fine.

Did you try again, by any chance? I just tried from a different hub, which I'm running on my VPS, from a channel that's not connected to this one. It came up just fine. This hub is the one that's running off the mini PC, so behind my DSL router. Both this one and the one on my VPS are up to date at 3.8.4, but I can't imagine that would be an issue.

still does not work for me, and i still can open the image in a new tab -- by right-clicking the smaller preview in your profile. interestingly, after the image opens in a new tab -- only the image, not the colorbox HTML around it -- vivaldi (chrome engine) isn't able to 'analyze' it, which it can with pretty much all other images. it tries for a while, then says, "unable to analyze image." perhaps something wrong with the .jpg, like a byte or two missing at the end?

yes, it's the "colorbox" jquery thing that's supposed to show the full image. if you right-click the file preview you can "open link in new tab" and open the actual .jpg. and that .jpg my browser wasn't able to analyze. makes me doubt the .jpg itself.

same thing. image opens, eventually. takes longer than it should, but that may be due to many reasons; usually it's my internet connection. after it opens it "...can't be analyzed." (edit: on the clone-link you provided.)

Yeah, but why only this picture? And why not all of you? It's not even that large of a file; I've shared much larger files through my local Nextcloud instance. I think I'm too tired to figure this stuff out

what i would do: file it away as some weird fluke and go on with life -- if it doesn't happen again. the .jpg must have been cut short, if i'm right, at some very particular point: enough data to make it display in a browser and have hubzilla link it to your post, but not enough to have it analyzed and, for some of us, open the colorbox plugin.

@Tanja i have investigated a little and it appears to be a bug in latest Hubzilla. I have pushed a fix to master. You should be fine again after your next git pull. Might need to re-upload the photo though...

this is incredible: with other opensource apps people have a hard time getting the developers' attention, but here you don't even have to contact them specifically. things that don't work are picked up from the stream and immediately fixed!

+100

reading this thread i'm not sure though if this has been finally solved or if it's still under investigation...

Thank you, @alysonsee (Hz), for the kind wishes. I'm not very hopeful, though. Lots of people seem to be really stressed out these days. But, who knows, they might surprise me. It's only till noon, thankfully.

it's pretty simple: before opening an image colorbox as well as wget ask for the size. that's stored in the database, and until your latest update that was, in some cases, wrong. the browser, when opening the image directly, tries to show whatever is there, and that was the image.

Even if you remove WhatsApp and Instagram from the company's control, the core of its business, the actual social network, is too effing huge. It's out of control. It's impossible to hire enough moderators for 2.2 billion accounts (at least if you want to make the kind of profit they have in mind.) Algorithms don't work. I honestly don't see how this mess can be fixed.

I don't think it can be fixed - and I think Facebook is in decline, for years (slowly, granted) - now this is getting more obvious, leading to such ill advised moves by Zuckerberg and Sandberg. I myself don't care about Facebook one way or the other, I've got an account on it because it's more convenient to stay up do date with the rest of my family (living in distant cities, even in the UK), but I don't use it for any serious work. A little bit akin to my (virtual) Windows: I use it for certain programs (taxes, label printing) which won't run (or extremely poorly) on Linux, but most of the time (>99%, I guess) I'm using Linux as my desktop.

The real question is; do we want it fixed? The inherent problem with Facebook imo, isn't that it's algorithms isn't perfectly able to control what people chose to utter on their website. The problem is actually not with Facebook at all. It's with us, the society that failed to regulate a business practice of exploiting our psychological weaknesses, and of centralising power of fear it may make some of the super rich slightly less super rich. It's with the human need to belong, and our desire for convenience that sadly is much stronger than our will to independence and freedom.

Facebook and the other old-style "social media" is broken by design and purpose. Instead of wasting energy trying to fix them, we should rather make them irelevant. Supporting the free social network (wether it's named Zot, Diaspora, ActivityPub or anything else,) and the wider internet in general is part of that. Educating our peers about how the internet economy based on surveillance capitalism works and why it matters, is another part.

In the end, though, changing humanity abruptly has never worked well before, and there's no reason to think this process is any different. Democracy used a few hundred years to mature to anything we would recognize as democracy today, internet literacy and understanding how it affects our society will also have to take it's time. We're only at the very start of it, even though the suits and ties that make billions on exploiting us wants you to think of it differently.

It's like the drummer of my band says: "In a hundred years people will look back on the unregulated social media of today and ask: What were they thinking?" He's still on facebook, and not part of the free social network, however. As always, convenience trumps rationality. Every time. Sadly.

@Harald Eilertsen You're making some excellent points, and what you say goes along with many of the things that frustrate me so much.

I read an article today on the spread of "fake news" (I'm really starting to loathe this term; it has become such an empty buzz word.) That's, of course, one of the things everybody is demanding of Facebook they fix. It's also one of the things I don't think is possible to fix. Fact checking is work, and most people are too mentally lazy to do it. If something fits into their world view, they don't feel the need to look into it.

I remember a discussion I had with somebody on Facebook a long time ago. It was when the Zika virus and the resulting microcephaly were spreading. I had a Facebook contact who was actually a pretty smart and progressive person. A retired teacher. She was also a radical environmentalist. She posted this Kermit meme; I can't remember the exact wording, but it stated two things as "facts": That microcephaly is spreading (true), and that Monsanto is pushing a larvacide in the area (a tiny, tiny, true core.) Then it went on to imply a correlation. (But not really; it only said, "Just sayin'" after making those two statements.)So, party pooper Tanja went and did some research. I pointed out that, a) the larvacide was not made by Monsanto, but rather by a Japanese company that happens to have a business relationship with Monsanto, and b) there was already plenty of evidence emerging that the unusually high number of cases of microcephaly was being caused by the Zika virus, whereas there was no evidence whatsoever linking the larvacide to microcephaly.But for some people, when they see the name Monsanto, they seem to disengage the rational part of their brain and switch to fight-or-flight mode. (Usually opting to fight.)

I'm not telling this to get into a discussion about Monsanto, but as a good example how even smart people fall into this trap.

It's with us, the society that failed to regulate a business practice of exploiting our psychological weaknesses, and of centralising power of fear it may make some of the super rich slightly less super rich. It's with the human need to belong, and our desire for convenience that sadly is much stronger than our will to independence and freedom.

What happened, as I see it, is that it's Facebook users who made it was it is today. It's not how it started. It started connecting students online who went to the same university, and for a long time it was just people who actually knew each other using it to stay connected. Zuckerberg initially didn't see coming what ended up happening, which is why he didn't have a plan for it. And when it started to happen he realized how much money there was to be made, so he didn't take the time to at least start working on a plan.

There's an impressive documentation film (in German) about the big undercover censorship army trying to keep Facebook contents "clean" - that's why the film is called "The Cleaners". Rentable on YouTube or wherever you may find it else. But don't miss to watch it.

My fear is: Facebook is too big to fail, but too weak to keep control.If Facebook would shut down, this would lead to mass revolts in all parts of the world, because millions and millions of people are completely dependant from Facebook. But if won't be shut down some day, it might cause world wars and other human desasters.

I'm not sure if there would be mass revolts - maybe more something like the befuddlement peole have when there's a blackout: You look down the street if your house is the only one involved, go down and have a chat with neighbours, talking about the bizarre situation. Besides, I don't think that it will shut down with a bang, it'll slowly grow into obscurity like so many sites before them (remember stayfriends?)

@Stefan Münz Well, I guess we must hope then that at some point people will either wake up or get bored, so that FB will eventually go the way of MySpace...

Unfortunately, most people fail to realize that it's in their control. Everybody I know is bitching and moaning about Facebook, but nobody wants to be the first person to make the switch. Especially when it comes to WhatsApp. I dumped WA, as a matter of principle, so I know how hard it is to get people to at least co-install Signal.

All we can do, as @Harald Eilertsen already pointed out, is to work to promote free alternatives and educate the people in our immediate sphere of influence.

You’re in good company; plenty of professional news outlets do the same thing.

Good to know

At least I have the excuse that it's not my native language. Coming to think of it, I don't think that, had I written in German, I would have phrased it that way. It's actually really good of you to point this out; sometimes we all need a little reminder to think before we type - or at least before we hit that submit / post button.

"fake news" ... It's also one of the things I don't think is possible to fix.

Neither is it a problem that originated with, or is specific to facebook. We had shady websites with dubious content before facebook, and we had chain emails with the same and threats of bad karma for breaking the chain even before that. And then there was the pamphlets and fanzines before that again.

Like you say, it's the users who made facebook what it is, but not without guidance. The addictiveness of the site has been thoroughly planned and researched. The algorithms that prioritize polarizing content to keep the user base engaged, has not come about by chance. Bright people has worked hard to make these things work to maximum benefit of the company and their customers.

Everybody I know is bitching and moaning about Facebook, but nobody wants to be the first person to make the switch.

There's really nowhere for them to switch. Their entire reason for using facebook, is that everybody else is there and it's easy to find and connect with them. There's no other website where this is the case. We could of course go back to using the web. I would like that, but the fact remains that it's much more difficult to look up someone on the web than a central directory where everybody is registered.

If you could switch to another provider and still be connected to your friends (like you can on the free social network,) this could be different, but since the whole point of facebook is to keep you from communicating with anybody on the outside, I don't see that happening. At least not without regulation.

But this also brings us to the wonderful thing about the free social network. We can keep in touch with each other, across servers, across platforms, and even across networks! Now that's a powerful idea, that most people can understand and relate to. Seed it, and in time it may bloom.

@Harald Eilertsen True. But the exposure wasn't as widespread, and people didn't forward anywhere near as mindlessly as the do now. Also, one manually forwarded e-mail or link didn't reach as many people at once.

And they really did some brave things, take for example The Black Hole: Yes, it's not exactly a masterpiece, but it did contain quite a lot genuinely frightening content / nightmare fuel, very very different from the usual Disney content. Event Horizon could be called a spiritual successor

@Hyp🌧lite Pe☂ov🍃n (he/him) Before I write a forum post, I would like to test something. I just turned off ActivityPub in my Hubzilla account. I'll write a comment from my D* and Friendica accounts, let's see if they show up the way they're supposed to. Can somebody from #hubzilla please write a comment to this? I seem to have problems with comments not showing up elsewhere... @Mark Nowiasz, feel like doing the honors?

Also noted something interesting when I started this post. When I started to write the mention in the beginning, it showed up like this:And that was after disabling ActivityPub.

Thanks, @Harald Eilertsen, @Mario Vavti Yes, the D* comment is now showing. Also, both of your comments show on my Friendica and D* accounts.

@alysonsee (Hz) Can you see and comment on this on your Friendica account? There's something else I noticed; both you and Mr. Petovan show up in my Hubzilla connections as "ActivityPub", whereas my Friendica account shows as "Friendica". I haven't updated my Friendica instance in a while since I'm not really using it anymore. Since I disabled the ActivityPub app, I'd like to know if the connection even still works.

Mario, if it's something on the Friendica end, there probably isn't too much I can do about it, is there?

@Hyp🌧lite Pe☂ov🍃n (he/him) On an unrelated note, I can't see your comment on either my diaspora* or my Friendica account. Here (Hubzilla) it shows as "from ActivityPub". I should probably post a question to the Hubzilla forum because this is not the first time this is happening, but that's gonna have to wait till tomorrow.

I started to work on my #French again. I already tried this last year, but I got stuck, and there was too much else going on at the time. I realized that I forgot way too much, so I'm starting over with a new account. Anybody else here using Duolingo?

I used this to learn Spanish for some time. There are intended funny sentences such as "Los elefantes beben leche" ("The elephants are drinking milk), but the one that beats them all is "Él come pollo aunque no come pescado", ("He eats chicken even though he doesn't eat fish")

@Stefan Münz Yeah, I saw some of those during my first excursion there. If they were intended to be funny, it wasn't working very well; all they got out of me was some head shaking and getting into the habit of taking my computer to another room so as not to embarrass myself in front of my co-habitating American who knows enough French to get around.

(And this last sentence is proof that English is my second language, German being my first )